Includes: The contests are the same as the regular issue however the cover is a one-of-a-kind made by an artist friend of Smartish Pace. The covers are made of everything from oil paint to collage. Watch the making of the covers. Trust us, you will love it; everyone gets a different cover!

Includes: The contests are the same as the regular issue however the cover is a one-of-a-kind made by an artist friend of Smartish Pace. The covers are made of everything from oil paint to collage. Watch the making of the covers. Trust us, you will love it; no two covers are the same!

with mighty wings outspread
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good
with difficulty and labour hard
feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall
Their starry dance in numbers that compute
wounds of deadly hate
with many a rill
With mazy error under pendent shades
into their inmost bower
Love unlibidinous reigned
self-begot, self-raised
my sect thou seest
sulphurous and nitrous
The grassy clods now calved
What next I bring shall please thee
death is to me as life
And for thee, whose perfection far excelled
See, Father, what firstfruits on Earth are sprung
add love

(in memory of Ronald Johnson)

##

Forty years in the desert of meaning
lost opportunities strangely contrived

Forty days in the deluge of meaning
two by two as previously arranged

Forty signs expecting completion
miscomputed or misconstrued

Forty lines suddenly recovered
meaning they were here all along

Meaning was here all along
wilderness or flood

Or flooded wilderness
evacuated of meaning

Jarring of place
place of the jar

In which nothing could be lost
so that nothing would be lost

Except except
stones from a mountain

Meaning this
and this

#

Dear T,

I think I understand what Spicer means in his first letter to Lorca when he writes that the letters “will establish the bulk, the wastage.” He declares that “they are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent”; that in the letters, “We will use up our rhetoric . . . so that it will not appear in our poems.” He calls the letters “unnecessary,” though they are written, it seems, to leach out some sort of verbal dross—which would make them very necessary indeed. And of course, they appear in the midst of the poems, and have had at least as much influence. Spicer must have understood this by the time he includes the letter to Blaser in Admonitions: after all, he tells Blaser that “This is the most important letter that you have ever received.”
When I realized that I had miscounted in this movement, that I had written 3x20 lines instead of 4x20, I experienced a moment of sheer panic, despite what I’ve written about disasters, discontinuities, verbal shocks, and that which we “loveth best” revealing itself only against or through the structure. Hence this letter, which is absolutely necessary, in the same way it was deemed necessary for the Hebrews to wander in the desert for forty years after almost entering the Promised Land. I haven’t been wandering in the desert of meaning for forty years, but I have been here long enough to understand that the temporary can become permanent in all sorts of surprising ways. That’s just as well: the Promised Land is only a horizon; its promise ceases the moment one enters.
Thanks again for your continued support—and patience.

Love always,

N.

Norman Finkelstein is a professor of English at Xavier University. He is the author of four books of criticism and five poetry collections including Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007)—a volume of poems containing work from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s. On Mt. Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issues 5, 10, 13 and 16. [bio updated 2009]